Wednesday, August 8, 2018

The Magic Leap One is a three-piece system that includes a headset called Lightwear, a small wearable computer called the Lightpack, and a handheld controller.

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the Lightpack is specifically slightly smaller than a CD-ROM, so people won’t mistake it for a CD player. Given the Magic Leap One’s mildly ‘90s-retro look, that seems like a legitimate concern.

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unless Magic Leap is deliberately holding any big projects for a consumer release, I’m not sure what its internal studios and partners have been doing with several years and virtually unlimited funding, and why it wouldn’t showcase more of their work during the Magic Leap One’s big debut.

For example, while demoing a paint program in Magic Leap One I opened a floating palette of creative tools and selected a sticker tool which created a virtual sticker of some creature (a unicorn, I think) on any surface I pointed at. I turned away and, in the midst of a polite conversation with staffers, slapped stickers all over the room and the people in it.

As you might expect, there's something uncomfortably invasive about the act of putting something -- even a virtual object -- on someone else's person without their knowledge or consent. More on that to come. However, the stickers stayed exactly where I'd stuck them for the rest of the conversation, even as I looked away or moved around the room, making them feel "real" in the same way that the chairs or the people felt real.

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Abovitz says the company does have plans to police what's available on Magic Leap World with an eye towards ensuring nothing potentially harmful or disturbing gets into people's headsets.

I asked about this a lot since people can be affected by your Magic Leap experience whether they know it or not: I was able to plaster someone in virtual stickers without their consent, for example, and you can imagine what users will do with the ability to draw 3D objects around other people in the same room.

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